Record meteorite hit Norway

As Wednesday morning dawned, northern Norway was hit
with an impact comparable to the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima.

Peter Bruvold witnessed the meteorite streaking
across the night sky.

PHOTO: PETER BRUVOLD

The map shows the meteorite's direction of fall
(the arrow) and the possible impact area over Troms and Finnmark
counties.

At around 2:05 a.m. on Wednesday, residents of the northern part of Troms and
the western areas of Finnmark could clearly see a ball of fire taking several
seconds to travel across the sky.

A few minutes later an impact could be heard and geophysics and seismology
research foundation NORSAR registered a powerful sound and seismic disturbances
at 02:13.25 a.m. at their station in Karasjok.

Farmer Peter Bruvold was out on his farm in Lyngseidet with a camera because
his mare Virika was about to foal for the first time.

"I saw a brilliant flash of light in the sky, and this became a light
with a tail of smoke," Bruvold told Aftenposten.no. He photographed the
object and then continued to tend to his animals when he heard an enormous
crash.

"I heard the bang seven minutes later. It sounded like when you set off
a solid charge of dynamite a kilometer (0.62 miles) away," Bruvold said.

Astronomers were excited by the news.

"There were ground tremors, a house shook and a curtain was blown into
the house," Norway's best known astronomer Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard
told Aftenposten.no.

Røed Ødegaard said the meteorite was visible to an area of several hundred
kilometers despite the brightness of the midnight sunlit summer sky. The
meteorite hit a mountainside in Reisadalen in North Troms.

"This is simply exceptional. I cannot imagine that we have had such a
powerful meteorite impact in Norway in modern times. If the meteorite was as
large as it seems to have been, we can compare it to the Hiroshima bomb. Of
course the meteorite is not radioactive, but in explosive force we may be able
to compare it to the (atomic) bomb," Røed Ødegaard said.

The astronomer believes the meteorite was a giant rock and probably the
largest known to have struck Norway.

"The record was the Alta meteorite that landed in 1904. That one was 90
kilos (198 lbs) but we think the meteorite that landed Wednesday was
considerably larger," Røed Ødegaard said, and urged members of the public
who saw the object or may have found remnants to contact the Institute of
Astrophysics.